Notebook
'Giving the "Observer" to Rupert Murdoch would be like giving your lovely 18-year-old daughter to a gorilla.' Mr Clive James was speaking at a journalists' meeting the other, year when such an outcome seemed likely. King Kong— or Rupert Bear — didn't get the girl that time, but he is now stalking down the Gray's Inn Road. Informed circles close to Times Newspapers (the Blue Lion and the Duke of York) seem sure that Mr Murdoch will get the group. Not long ago he said that he had no wish to buy The Times. Perhaps he is following the Viennese saying that if you want the meat you have to pay for the bones. Paradoxically, it is not necessarily The Times which is the bones: as Mr Paul Johnson was saying a fortnight ago, The Times can, in theory, be moved to another newspaper press and run at a profit. The Sunday Times is chained to its unlucky premises. Last Friday the Sunday Times Journalists were to be canvassed as to their preferences among Goldsmith, Lonrho, Maxwell, Murdoch and Rothermere. In the event they only expressed a hope that Mr Harold Evans's consortium should be offered a fair chance. Mr Evans has now come close to conceding defeat at the hands of Mr Murdoch — or maybe at the hands of the Thomson Organisation.
The case against Mr Murdoch is ambiguous. Mr Foot, among others, is worried about a Press monopoly, although Mr Murdoch is a very long way from controlling half the London newspaper circulation, as Northcliffe did. The other objection is cultural. The Sun is indeed rivalled only by the Star in awfulness. (Mr Phillip Hodson thinks differently. In his letter last week he told us that the Star is 'an excellent popular newspaper tailored to its market', but then, as one of Mr Hodson's fellow sexeducationists once remarked, he would say that, wouldn't he?) It is hard to explain to foreigners just how bad the cheap British Press is, Enlightened American friends throw up their hands in horror at what Mr Murdoch has done to the New York Post. They cannot believe that, compared to the 'not, the Post might be the Neue Ziircher Zeitung. But if Mr Murdoch is not fastidious .bout making money, he is not stupid about IttL either. He doesn't print naked ladies in e Australian, and if he has moved one New York .paper down-market he has not a.e so with another, the successful Village Whose resentful columnists are a___Ilnowed to abuse their proprietor in print as e'u_ jg as the paper stays in profit. I was not that nnrely surprised that a poll-of-the-pollMr -never-was at the Sunday Times showed Murdoch a clear favourite. There are no good movies on in Washington, Nick von Hoffman was saying the other week. If it is any consolation, there aren't many in London, and the few good ones come off almost immediately. A case in point was Breaker Moroni, the fine AuStralian film by Bruce Beresford about the Boer war which only ran for a few weeks. Full of admiration for it as I was, it had me puzzling again about the Australian Personality. Only the Aussies, it is tempting to say, could think it an example of Porn beastliness and class justice that soldiers were severely punished for murdering numerous prisoners of war. The historical facts on which Breaker Morant are based are not in spute. Kitchener first tacitly encouraged the terror by which that abominable war was waged and then sought tocurb the worst excesses by exemplary punishment. Morant drew the short straw. One might think that it was the terror itself which should be reprehended rather than attempts — however arbitrary — to suppress it. The film is not tendentious exactly, but our sympathies are engaged for Morant and his chums, not for the dozen or more Dutch farmers whom they shot in cold blood after surrender. Perhaps Breaker Morant is saying something important about Vietnam to the Australians, for whom that war was as real an experience as for the Americans. I have an idea what it will say to the Afrikaners, in whose folk memory there lingers an even greater hatred of Australian (and Canadian) than of British soldiers.
Good sights of 1980 were a badger on top of the North Devon cliffs, looking intently at me in broad daylight, and a red squirrel sitting in a tree, high up a valley in Cumberland, ignoring me and intently eating. I wish them both good luck, the squirrel with grey immigrants (they come over here, eat our berries, take our jobs, sponge off the welfare and hold noisy parties), the badger with Lord Zuckerman's great purge. Bad sights of 1980 were the new telephone kiosks which are proliferating, first a red model, then an even nastier yellow one. There is no reason at all for those horrible things except the Post Office's mania for change. It would be had enough if the telephone boxes were replacing something undistinguished. In fact, they supercede Giles Scott's boxes, among the finest pieces of small-scale architectural design between the wars. The familiar philistine complaint is that Scott's boxes are dated. They are not. They are of their age, something quite different. Durham Cathedral and Chatsworth are of their age. The new Post Office boxes were dated in the worst sense — tawdry Sixties-Seventies Kitsch — as soon as they appeared.
Some of my best friends are Irish. But I confess that one of the few bright spots of the Labour Party Conference last October was a visit to the music hall where Mr Les Dawson told a stream of genuinely funny 'Irish jokes. As a genre, this joke is worldwide. To the Americans they are Polack jokes, to the French Belgian jokes, in Yugoslavia it is the Bosnian joke, and Ireland itself has the Kerry joke. I once described here how an Irish joke was being told in a Fleet Street bar. The audience included a Swedish friend of mine who looked blank and then said, 'Oh, you mean a Norwegian joke.' At Christmas dinner in Barbados I pulled a cracker of Canadian make (I have not made any of that up). Out came a plastic puzzle, a funny hat, and a scrap of paper with a 'Newfie' — Newfoundland — joke. No doubt somewhere, even now, an earnest young semiologist is working on 'Ethnic variations in the joke of human stupidity'. For his benefit, the best of Les Dawson's jokes was about the Irish obscene telephone caller. After much shaggy-dog lewdness and heavy breathing the punch-line is, 'Look, whoile Oi'm sayin' all this to yer, would ye stop tellin' me the toime.'
What is the Jockey Club's, or rather Weatherby's, policy on the naming of horses? Owners often complain that choosing names is very difficult because so many have been used before, though that is not the only problem. Not long ago you could not use a horse's name for advertising purposes; it is now possible, if not encouraged. Some famous horses — Colonist and Sea Bird — have had 'H' tacked on after their names to differentiate them from less illustrious namesakes. But the rule does not seem to apply to steeplechasers, or perhaps to any geldings. There is a horse in training at the moment called Oscar Wilde, but another horse of the same name, also a chaser, was running well within living memory. Can one call another steeplechaser Oscar Wilde as soon as the present one has been retired, or has died? The name of the previous Oscar greatly tickled the late Victor Chandler, who used to stand on the rails calling out, 'Nine-to-two the one who likes to come from behind.' Bookmakers are easily amused.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
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